WEEK
2
Naturally Pure and Wholesome

Wildlife experts in Scotland have urged the public to help save swans by feeding them brown loaves instead of white. A lack of nutrients in white bread is leaving the birds crippled with a condition similar to rickets in humans.
—The Scotsman, February 15, 2008

It’s a sad state of affairs when the only thing you have to read over breakfast is a bag of flour.

Thanks to Anne, I’ve become so accustomed to having the New York Times delivered early every morning—home delivery was a de facto condition of our marriage—that when I beat the person we used to call “the paper boy” to the kitchen and have nothing to read over breakfast, I go a little stir crazy and will read anything: I’ll peruse the back of the cereal box for the tenth time (just in case it’s changed or they have a new mail-in offer); I’ll study the junk mail to see what the local Chinese food buffet place is offering for their special, romantic Valentine’s Day buffet (all-you-can-eat king crab legs, in case you’re wondering what turns a girl on—just try to keep those specks of crab off your cheek); I will in fact even read a flour bag to stave off Times withdrawal.

Thanks, as I say, to Anne. I’ll admit that I was attracted to Anne some twenty-five years ago by her looks, but I became intrigued when I saw her reading the Times over lunch one day at the Office where we both worked. Suffice it to say, I hadn’t dated a lot of women who read anything more challenging than TV Guide, much less the Times. Thus Anne’s reading this paper in front of me so blatantly was the erotic equivalent of an ovulating baboon displaying her swollen red rump, and I eventually worked up the courage to ask her to lunch, figuring that at the least we’d have something to talk about. Which we did.

Not long after, Anne left the research institute where I still work today to begin medical school, and we subsequently married, had two kids, yada yada, and as Anne was finishing up her residency in internal medicine in the Bronx, we were eager (well, I was eager) to move to a more rural area. Anne was willing to indulge me, to follow me anywhere—almost. She had merely one nonnegotiable demand. One evening after the kids were in bed, she came over to the regional map I was studying at the kitchen table and drew a rough circle, indicating the approximate home-delivery limit of the Times.

“Anywhere inside the circle is fine,” she said, smiling.

Fair enough. I found a small town in the Mid-Hudson Valley, just inside the northern edge of the circle, and indeed, before closing on the house, Anne called the paper to make sure the address was in their delivery area. Seventeen years later, Bobbie Davis still tosses the paper onto (or close to) our patio, 365 days a year.

So what does this have to do with the price of bread, as they say? Well, I was downstairs at five thirty to start the poolish and I was going a little nuts because the paper hadn’t come yet, giving me nothing to read over breakfast. Nothing but a bag of King Arthur flour. It turns out there’s a lot to read on a bag of King Arthur, a northeastern brand highly regarded by both commercial and serious home bakers. I learned from the bag that the company is 100 percent employee-owned. There was a glowing testimonial from “I. M.” (hmm . . . sounds like an inside gag: “I. M. really the CEO”) plus a greeting from the president, and a recipe. I read the slogan “Naturally Pure and Wholesome” and saw that King Arthur flour was “Never Bleached. Never Bromated.” That was reassuring. Much of the flour sold in America is still treated with peroxides and/or bromides at the mill—practices outlawed in the European Union owing to overwhelming evidence of the carcinogenic properties of these chemicals, used to both whiten the flour (pure, fresh flour has a creamy color) and “age” it (artificial aging is cheaper than storing the flour for several weeks while it undergoes natural oxidation), which improves the baking properties.

Finally I turned the bag to its side and read the small print near the bottom.

Ingredients: Unbleached hard wheat flour, malted barley flour (a natural yeast food), niacin (a B vitamin), reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate (vitamin B ₁), riboflavin (vitamin B ₂), folic acid (a B vitamin).

Odd. If it was so “naturally pure and wholesome,” why was it loaded up with all those B vitamins?

I thought about other enriched foods we eat. Some breakfast cereals contain the equivalent of a multivitamin for marketing purposes, but among the staple foods, milk (with added vitamin D) and salt (with iodine) were the only others that came to mind. And they have only a single additive. Was this just King Arthur’s thing? I pulled another bag of flour, a generic brand, from our cupboard. Same ingredients.

I wasn’t sure I was crazy about this. Why did I have to take a supplement with my bread?

A good question, and one that deserved an answer. But first I had to start some bread. Last week’s touchstone loaf was well named: hard as rock and nearly as heavy, even though the dough had risen quite nicely. To an outsider—say, my wife—it may have looked as if I was making the exact same loaf this week, but not so! Today I was omitting the second quarter teaspoon of yeast from the dough, relying only on the yeast in the poolish, on the theory that the heaviness might be the result of too much, not too little, yeast, causing the bread to overrise, then collapse in the oven.

A mere quarter teaspoon seems like an awfully small amount of yeast. Most recipes call for between one and two teaspoons of yeast, but those recipes make bread in a few hours. Mine would take eight or nine hours, giving a smaller amount of yeast more time to do the job, especially while in the poolish, which is a breeding ground for yeast.

Four hours later, the surface of the poolish, dotted with small bubbles, was already smelling vaguely of bread. After adding the remaining flour and two teaspoons of salt, I attached the dough hook to the mixer and set the timer for twelve minutes. This should’ve been twelve minutes I had available to do something else, but as the mixer flung the dough around the bowel with the dough hook, it started dancing across the countertop with an unerring instinct for the edge, keeping me standing at the counter with one hand on the mixer the entire time. The kneaded dough was slightly elastic and just a bit sticky, which I’d read is exactly what you’re after. It should provide some “tack” to a hard surface but pull away nearly cleanly when you apply a little force. I misted some plastic wrap with vegetable-oil spray and covered the dough, leaving it to rise for two hours.

While the dough was rising, I went up to my Office to call the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Hotline to find out why their “naturally wholesome” flour had an ingredient list that read like a medicine chest inventory. A pleasant woman with just a snowflake of New England in her voice answered on the second ring. “For flours that are used to make staple products like bread, it’s federally mandated that we add vitamins and minerals to flour,” she explained. This had been true since the 1940s, “when refined flour was becoming popular and Americans were becoming vitamin-deficient.”

Wait a second—the “Greatest Generation” was vitamin-deficient? Tom Brokaw had left that part out. Interesting.

“You’re probably not the person to ask,” I said apologetically, “but do you know why these particular vitamins were chosen?”

“Well, actually, I am,” she said, a little put off.

“Sorry.” I found myself apologizing again.

“These are vitamins that are known to prevent certain nutritional diseases—diseases of nutritional deficiency—like rickets.” That would be the riboflavin. Thiamin was to prevent beriberi, which had disabled almost as many Japanese soldiers as the Russians had in the Russo-Japanese War, and iron, of course, prevents anemia. Folic acid was to prevent birth defects like spina bifida. I asked her about the fourth B vitamin in the flour, niacin.

“Niacin prevents something called, I think, pellagra.”

“Pellagra? What’s that?”

“You’re right. I’m really not the person to ask.”

I apologized yet again, thanked her for her help, and hung up, almost satisfied. Something bothered me. Rickets, beriberi, anemia—I had heard of these diseases, but not pellagra. Why was there a vitamin in my flour and in every slice of commercial bread sold in America in the past sixty years to prevent a disease I’d never heard of? Maybe there was some other, more familiar name for it (like “polio” or something). I scribbled “pellagra” on a piece of paper and shoved it into my desk drawer along with receipts, rubber bands, pens new and old, and the other detritus of the home Office.

Then I went downstairs to read the Times.